Nebula Awards Showcase 2001: The Year's Best SF and Fantasy Chosen by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

by Robert Silverberg

  Yes, these are the things Lucia has trouble coping with. So many little creases and flaws, more than she could catalogue in half a lifetime, let alone in the raw seconds she believes she has left. The beast’s stubby-but-oh-so-big front legs pedal the air in front of its body, and then it suddenly finds itself falling.

  It doesn’t push itself forward as it falls. It doesn’t, as it were, attack. It drops to the ground in front of Lucia, not on top of her, and the impact would surely crack the Earth open if the ground here weren’t so used to the abuse. This is the way a bull-mammoth warns off the opposition. Lucia’s realizing that even as she peels her heart from the roof of her mouth and tries to stop herself falling over (noticing, as an incidental detail, that the smell of sweat which is starting to blot out the dung-scent is hers and not the fault of the herd).

  The bull-mammoth is exhausted. It’s not a creature built for rearing up on its hind legs, and the only conclusion we—like Lucia—can reach is that it expects strangers to be so intimidated by its mass that it doesn’t actually need to follow up the threat. Having made its point, having bellowed its great beef-heart out, it can’t do anything more than stand still and get its breath back. Lungs the size of fat children inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, under a heavy pelt that must be home to entire empires of insects. From four feet above her head, those huge black eyes are staring down at Lucia, as if the thing’s daring her to try anything else.

  Easy to call it the face of Nature’s God. So big, so blatant, that we can only assume it’s been put there for a purpose. Which it has, as Lucia well knows. All animals are there for a purpose. Horses are for riding, pigs are for eating. As far as she’s concerned, the mammoths are here as a kind of metaphor. These are political animals, hence Mr. Jefferson’s interest.

  (You must have been wondering, for example, where this herd originates: woolly skins and elephant-blubber hardly seem to fit in around here. The best explanation we can hope for is that a number of mammoths were once the property of Catherine of Russia, she who was known as “The Great” before some idiot in her court started spreading that God-awful story about the horse. Horse or no horse, Catherine had something of a reputation as a witch . . . a label applied to most efficient female rulers, it’s true, but even before her death there were fabulous and revolting stories about the company she liked to keep, and the animal rites they used to perform. Horses for riding, pigs for eating, trained monkeys for ritual. It’s not entirely clear what the link is between the Empress of Russia being a witch and the existence of live mammoths here in what will one day be the State of Montana, although Lucia has heard it said, with maddening vagueness, that one can easily lead to the other. History is full of these logical gaps. Certainly, it’s rumored that one such hairy beast was given by Catherine as a gift to George III of England, but that George—half-crazed brute that he was—destroyed the thing in a fight with pit dogs without even realizing its value. Lucia is secretly of the opinion that if Russia had given such a gift to the French, they probably would have eaten it.)

  But Lucia’s mammoth just keeps gasping. It’s vulnerable now. With its show of strength over, it’s got nothing to protect it but its dignity. Gravity has not been kind to these creatures, which probably explains why they’re ripping up the grass on the crater floor when there are so many nice fresh trees just a couple of hundred yards over the rim. So when Lucia takes a step forward, the mammoth doesn’t even blink: it’s impossible to imagine such a blink being anything but a major task, and taking anything less than an afternoon to complete. From the look on its face, we could almost believe it’s indignant.

  How can we help but try to read its expression? If the mammoths were put here as metaphors, then we can read them any way we like. It’s hard not to find meaning in something that big.

  There’s a stillness now, Lucia regarding the mammoth, the mammoth regarding Lucia. It’s only once Lucia has paid her respects to the silence that she raises her hand. The trunk is close enough to touch, and touch it she does. Her fingers run through the tiny brown hairs, across the leathery old skin, over the wrinkles and the patches of dirt. She almost expects the beast to flinch, or to purr like a cat.

  It’s vulnerable, anybody can see that. Now, and only now, Lucia gets her one big chance to touch the impossible.

  This is what passed between Mme. Cailloux and Broken Nose that morning, after they pulled themselves to their feet at dawn and began the final trek to the place of the mammoths:

  Mme. Cailloux spoke of a man called Jefferson, the leader of the colonists who lived off in the eastern lands. Mme. Cailloux explained to Broken Nose that her own tribal leader, Napoleon Short-Arse, had agreed to sell a portion of the land to the aforementioned Jefferson (a notion which, like the “employer” idea, Broken Nose finds profoundly stupid).

  “We’re afraid,” said the Mademoiselle. “All of us. Your people. My people.”

  Broken Nose told her that his people weren’t afraid of anything, which was, in his experience, what the French expected to hear from a stupid Indian.

  “There’s a saying in Europe,” Mme. Cailloux went on. “ ‘The other man’s grass is always greener.’ We fight for territory. We start wars to acquire the other man’s land. Why?”

  Broken Nose shrugged. “More room. For cattle.”

  “No,” the Frenchwoman told him. “It’s because we think . . . we secretly believe . . . that the other man’s land is a paradise. We start to believe there are great secrets there. Secrets we have to know for ourselves. And when we take the land away from him, and we find there’s no paradise there . . . then we tell ourselves it was the other man’s kind of paradise. Not ours. You understand?”

  “Your people are stupid,” said Broken Nose. (Not entirely true: this is what he believes he said, after the fact, although his training in the French tongue doesn’t cover the possibility of him insulting his “employers.” In his head, after the fact, he hears the words in his own language.)

  “Perhaps,” he imagines that Mme. Cailloux said. “But it’s a matter of warfare. In war, we attack the enemy’s resources. If an enemy has supply lines, we cut them. If an enemy has a better kind of weapon, we rid him of it.”

  This sounded to Broken Nose like the first sensible thing she’d said.

  She went on to explain many things which Broken Nose had either no understanding of or no interest in. She told him, for example, that in the possession of Napoleon Short-Arse there was a length of metal, which purportedly came from a weapon that had been used to cut the flesh of one of the white man’s gods “while he hung on the cross,” this metal having the power to induce divine visions (of the spirit-world, Broken Nose guessed) in anyone who was scratched by it.

  “Imagine such a thing in the power of the Vatican,” the Mademoiselle said, although Broken Nose had no idea what marked these Vatican out from any of the other European tribes. “The relic would prove them correct. It would show them to be justified in all their beliefs. Thus would their grass become greener, and their state grow stronger. They might even become whole.”

  “Whole?” queried Broken Nose.

  “I saw the Revolution,” replied Mme. Cailloux. “I know what happens when people get what they want. Or when they believe they do.”

  None of which told Broken Nose anything remotely useful, or even explained the woman’s mission to find the mammoths before the land gets passed on to Mr. Jefferson. But now, in what we have to call the present, Broken Nose is trying not to trip over his skin-shod heels as he tumbles down the slope of the crater. Up ahead, he can see Mme. Cailloux, facing the largest of all the mammoths (or is it just the closest?). He can see the woman resting her hand on the monster’s trunk, and he can see the beast keeping quite still, something which his fellow Shoshoni would probably take as proof of the foreign witch’s powers over the animal kingdom. But Broken Nose has little time for the wonders of nature, and sees her only as being lucky.

  He pulls himself to a halt as the ground
levels out under his feet, stopping just a few yards from the bulk of the bull-mammoth. Its eyes are fixed on the woman, and it makes pained groaning noises when it breathes. Slowly, and with some reluctance, Mme. Cailloux lowers her hand.

  “Tout,” she says. (This is the original French, of course, but somehow it makes more sense that way.)

  Broken Nose isn’t really sure where he should look. It seems disrespectful, somehow, to disturb this union. There they stand, woman and monster, in a communion that would seem almost obscene if it weren’t so unlikely. For some reason, Broken Nose remembers a folk tale from his childhood about a father who had an improper relationship with his daughter, and who was swallowed up by the Earth as a punishment. After a few moments more, he speaks.

  “The cargo,” he says, using a word he’s more than familiar with even though it’s not entirely the right one. “Our tools . . . .”

  It’s then that Mme. Cailloux regains her senses, preternatural or otherwise, and turns away from the beast. The mammoth never blinks, though, and never moves its head. The Mademoiselle looks up toward the top of the slope, presumably remembering the packs which she and Broken Nose have left over the rise, the equipment her own “employers” issued her before transporting her here to the Land of the Shining Mountains. (And just as we imagined Lewis and Clark standing to attention before Jefferson, so Broken Nose imagines Mme. Cailloux standing before Napoleon Short-Arse himself, although he’s imagining Napoleon sitting in a position of honor around a roaring fire rather than sitting behind a desk: there is, of course, no Shoshoni word for “furniture.”)

  So it is that Mme. Cailloux draws away from the mammoth, to begin her slow climb back up the slope, with Broken Nose at her heels. Mme. Cailloux doesn’t look back at the mammoth as she walks, something Broken Nose interprets as an almost incestuous shame. And the mammoth doesn’t watch her go, simply continuing to stare at the spot where she once stood. So it’s left to Broken Nose to glance over his shoulder on the way up the slope, to watch the woolly monster recover its strength after its four seconds’ worth of rabid activity, while the rest of the herd-animals go on bellowing and sniffing at each other. He wonders if the bull-mammoth even understands the difference between its human visitors and the other beasts of the wilderness.

  “These are Mr. Jefferson’s animals,” he hears Mme. Cailloux say, halfway up the rise. “They feed on Mr. Jefferson’s grass.”

  He still doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Broken Nose is starting to feel that even the mammoths understand this mission better than he does, but then again, wouldn’t you expect him to think that way? Being Shoshoni, when he uses the mammoths as a metaphor the results aren’t particularly literary.

  Which leads us back to the President of the United States of America himself, as he sits behind his rosewood desk in his rose-tinted office, picking snuff or hashish or chewing tobacco out of his little carved box. This is some months in what might be called Lucia’s future, so Lewis and Clark have in the last few minutes dutifully marched out of the office in their unlikely racoonskin hats. No doubt a kayak is waiting for them outside.

  But now Mr. Jefferson’s alone with his thoughts, and we can make the usual array of guesses as to what those thoughts might be. The President is hoping that his explorers will bring him back news of a Northwest Passage, a trade route that could turn his republic into an empire almost overnight (not that he wants an empire, as such, but . . . well, you know how it is). And then, of course, there’s the prospect of mammoths. If such things are found, they’re sure to be given a place of honor in the new American mythology. He briefly wonders if there’s room for a mammoth on the national crest: possibly he can put one in place of the eagle. A beast which proves, by its very nature, that the Church is full of asses and the world runs to the will of the new sciences. Just for a second, for a stupid childish second, he imagines riding the back of such an animal in a parade along Pennsylvania Avenue, celebrating his second—oh, to hell with precedent, make it his third—term in office. Jefferson’s monsters, that’s what the Church would say. He imagines the mammoths’ backs being draped in flags, decked out in the red-and-white stripes and the seventeen stars (although the flag which hangs above the window in this particular office only has sixteen, those artisans who handle such things being a little slower than the expansion of the new republic).

  All this makes Mr. Jefferson consider the box again. He tries to remember the name of the woman who presented it to him, the well-spoken Mademoiselle who appeared in this very office just a few short months ago, her skins and furs making her look like an Indian coming home from a trek in the great forests. Naturally, it’s ludicrous to think that a complete stranger, and such an ill-dressed one, should be allowed to stroll into the Presidential office without even officially presenting herself . . . but the notion’s as hard to resist as all the other things we’ve seen inside this virtual room. Whether or not the woman did introduce herself, the one thing Mr. Jefferson can remember is what she told him when she placed the little off-white box on his desk.

  “Your new world, Monsieur President,” she said. Well, maybe she didn’t say “mister” in the French style, maybe Jefferson’s just remembering it that way because he likes the accent, but the point remains that when he slid the box open he found inside it just a few blades of green, green grass. Mr. Jefferson fails to remember how he responded to this, or even whether he asked his visitor to explain herself: she may well have vanished from his office before he could so much as speak (after all, a mysterious entrance should always be complemented by a mysterious exit).

  Here and now, the President believes the contents of the box to have been a kind of message, sent by some agency he has yet to identify. In fact, he’s only halfright.

  And this is Jefferson’s future. More precisely, this is 1805, halfway through Lewis and Clark’s two-year excursion into the wildlands, the point at which the two men (and all their followers, though right now they’re gloriously irrelevant) finally stumble across a certain indentation in a certain grassland. A crater, if you will. It’s here that the two explorers, being consummate outdoorsmen, find trampled ground and traces of spoor which suggest the trail of some grand animal herd. At first they conclude that the Indians have driven their cattle through the area, though this theory falters when they arrive at the bottom of the basin, where the graves have been dug. They assume there are graves here, anyway, given that the ground’s been broken from one side of the crater to the other. Now, as not even the Shoshoni would do something as bizarre as grazing their animals on top of their dead—and as a quick search of the area uncovers European shell-casings in the grass—there’s obviously some kind of mystery here.

  Sadly, it’s not one the explorers feel they have time to solve. Besides, even by this stage they’re starting to learn that digging up native graves is a bad move, tactically speaking. There’s some discussion about what might be called the “central” grave, the fifteen-foot-long tract of broken earth which, from its size, must surely indicate the last resting place of a great leader (proving to the leader-obsessed white men that the people who performed these burials must have been partly civilized, even though the Shoshoni contingent in the expedition claims not to recognize the style). Lewis and Clark steer well clear, deciding to give the mysterious fallen chief the respect he must surely deserve.

  Later, in the oh-so-short years between the end of the expedition and Lewis’s highly dubious suicide, the duo will theorize that the site was deliberately desecrated by rogue Frenchmen as some kind of political maneuver. A stampede must have taken place at some point, so the large animals, whatever they may have been, were probably used by the French as weapons of destruction.

  Like Jefferson, these people excel at being only partly correct.

  And however far into the future we go, Mr. Jefferson, President of the United States of America, fails to understand the significance of any of this. Well, what can we expect? Polymath and philosopher he may be, but he
doesn’t even understand the significance of the box. The little off-white box which remains in his possession for the rest of his term in office, a gift from one of the very few people who understood exactly what he wanted from his glorious new territory, and knew precisely why he couldn’t be allowed to get it. A box Mr. Jefferson might have used for snuff, or hashish, or tobacco, which a Frenchwoman once claimed was all that remained of his virtual paradise, and which just happened to be made out of ivory.

  SLIPSHOD, AT THE

  EDGE OF THE

  UNIVERSE

  ROBERT THURSTON

  ON SLIPSHOD, THE LARGEST of the asteroids at our edge of the universe, we set up a temporary camp. I guess “we” is inappropriate since I, as their prisoner, had nothing to do with the operation. With no atmosphere on Slipshod (the name given the asteroid by our exec officer, Elaine), we had to stay within the transparent dome. Actually, I did not have to stay within the dome. I could slip out and drift over the asteroid’s surface. I had no need of atmosphere and was, by human definition, noncorporeal. Yet I could not waste energy reserves by going far. I had a substantial amount of reserve, but did not want to waste any in case a chance for a real escape came. And Slipshod was so plain and monotonous that scenic tours were out of the question.

  Elaine traced her fingers along the surface of one of the screens in the computer where I was, by human definition, caged. As her fingers lingered on the screen, I sipped at her energy. At that moment I needed none of the human energy, but I could never resist absorbing some of it from this woman who was regarded as so beautiful among the others. In my own sense of beauty, she is beautiful for the energy I absorb from her, an energy that, as it dissipates through my system, gives me a feeling like no other, like no other species I have absorbed from. Humans had the best reserves of energy I had ever experienced, and the most flavorful as well. And Elaine’s was the energy I most craved. Truly, it was superior to the energy received from any of my own kind whom I have loved or killed in the elongated span of my existence.